Use code SUMMERPRACTICE for a 25% discount on all On Demand Courses through August 31.

Gladness of the Wholesome: The Buddha’s Teaching on Awakening Joy

With James Baraz recorded on January 15, 2023.

Found our teachings useful? Help us continue our work and support your teachers with a donation. Here’s how.

The Buddha was known as The Happy One. Though Joy is one of the Seven Factors of Awakening, with so much emphasis on working with suffering, joy can sometimes seem frivolous or unspiritual. His teaching on attending to the ‘Gladness Connected with the Wholesome’ is a key aspect of Wise Effort and developing a loving heart. We will practice and explore together this foundation for awakening joy.

Listen to the audio version below, or click here to download the mp3.

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Norman Blair

    Settling Into Your Body In Meditation

    Finding a comfortable body posture when meditating is a crucial element in our practice. We can use our bodies as a way of experiencing change and impermanence. In this session, we will be looking at ways to make our bodies comfortable for meditation – both standing (if appropriate for your body) and sitting. We will examine various postures and do various techniques that can be helpful for meditating.

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    The Wisdom of No Escape

    Our lives include facing things we didn’t choose, and often cannot change; such as getting ill or injured, or loosing something or someone that we love. Dharma teachings invite us to turn towards these, instead of turning away from them. What is the wisdom that is available to us when we meet our experience with…

    Read More

  • Toby Sola

    The Out Breath: Unlocking Concentration

    Shodo Harada Roshi is known as a “teacher of teachers”, with masters from various lineages coming to sit with him in Japan. If you went to Harada’s monastery, the main meditation technique you’d learn involves slowing the out breath to last one minute. This drastically slows down your physiology, which in turn settles the mind.

    Read More

  • Resting in Love, as Love

    Consciousness itself is not disturbed by a busy mind. In practice, the ego takes this truth and says, “I will transcend mind.” But the “I” that experiences itself as separate from life cannot and will not ever know liberation. There is no such thing as an enlightened ego. What else is possible? Resting in Love,…

    Read More

  • Chris Willard

    The Joy of Letting Go: Simplicity and Renunciation

    In our consumer culture, we fall for the illusion that more choice-in things, work, people, even spiritual paths-leads to more freedom, when often the opposite is true. As Jack Kornfield says, we live “in an era of unlimited desires but limited resources, when we think it’s the opposite.” More mindful awareness of our consumption isn’t…

    Read More

  • Dave Smith

    The Gratification, The Danger and The Escape

    The triad of gratification, danger, and escape is one of the Buddha’s most concise and simple teachings for investigating everyday lived experience. This formula can be applied to every single aspect of our experience. Many Buddhist scholars point out that this teaching contains the earliest roots of what we have come to know as the…

    Read More

  • George Haas

    Meditation and Attachment Theory

    We will discuss Attachment Theory in the context of Buddhist Theravada Practice, exploring the traditional Buddhist path to liberation using descriptions of Attachment conditioning as a way to understand obstacles to practice. We will learn skillful ways of assembling an inner circle of close people to support your path to enlightenment.

    Read More